Currently, digital video records (DVRs) have a finite amount of storage for video. Over time, users tend to expect ever increasing amounts of storage and, after a few years or even a shorter time period can easily become frustrated with the amount of storage included in their DVR. Thus, DVR users are often confronted with a desire to upgrade or replace their DVR because of storage limitations.
Upgrading or replacing of a DVR presents cable companies and/or other providers of such equipment significant cost and logistical problems. Replacing a DVR simply because of storage constraints can be costly and wasteful since the tuner and/or other circuitry of the DVR often remains fully functional and can remain usable for many years beyond the point where a user becomes unsatisfied with the original storage capacity of the device.
Replacing of drives in DVRs can be time consuming and present problems in terms of the transfer of existing stored content. Many users of a DVR would like to keep the content they already have stored on the DVR requiring the transfer of the data as part of a DVR upgrade. This can take time and effort which can be costly from the perspective of a cable company or other supplier of DVRs on a lease or rental basis.
While at first it might seem that connecting DVRs to one another via a network might provide the DVRs the opportunity to use one another's storage devices, this is often not a practical solution since most DVRs encrypt the content they record on their local drives in a manner that makes it unusable to another DVR. While this is done for security reasons, it makes sharing of local storage devices among networked DVRs difficult or impractical in many cases.
Previous attempts to address storage problems have involved the use of external drives attached to a DVR to supplement the DVRs original storage with the data on the drive being encrypted in a manner specific to the DVR to which the drive is coupled. Customers find the use of external drives unsightly and cumbersome. Accordingly, while supporting the use of external drives might seem like an easy solution to limited local DVR problems, it is not practical for many applications due to consumer unhappiness with such an approach.
Rather than attempt to increase the local storage capacity of a DVR, one approach to home video recording and playback relies on a single centralized storage device being shared by multiple playback devices. In such implementations, the content is normally streamed and not stored for any significant amount of time on a playback device. While this approach allows for a single relatively large network storage device to be shared by multiple playback devices this approach also suffers from various network related disadvantages.
Since content is streamed over what is often a shared home network, the playback may be subject to network congestion issues. The home network used to communicate the streamed content, e.g., a wireless home network or wired home network, may not be able to provide the bandwidth required to stream multiple video programs simultaneously to all the video playback devices. This can result in playback delays, e.g., as a playback device must wait for its buffer to fill with sufficient content to begin playback of a program segment.
In view of the above discussion it should be appreciated that there is a need for improved methods and apparatus which can be used to record, store and playback content at a customer premise, e.g., home or business. It would be desirable if, at least in some embodiments, a DVR device need not be limited to its internal storage capacity. It would also be desirable if methods and/or apparatus could be developed to avoid or overcome at least some of the disadvantages of using a network based storage device relating to potential network communication delays and/or network congestion. While not critical it would be also desirable if content recorded and encrypted by one DVR on a home network at a customer premise could be decoded and displayed by another DVR on the home at the same customer premise but still being secure with respect to devices which are not part of the home network or which are outside the customer premise where the DVR is located.